Thursday, March 31, 2016

Brandywine River Museum of Art

March 19 through June 12

Louisa
Davis Minot (1788-1858). Niagara Falls, 1818. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40
5/8 in. Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Gift Mrs. Waldron
Phoenix Belknap, Sr., to the Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., Collection,
1956. 1956.3
A stunning array of over 40 paintings from the New-York Historical
Society’s collection by renowned Hudson River School artists, including
Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper Cropsey, John F.
Kensett, and William T. Richards, will be on view for the first time at
the Brandywine River Museum of Art from March 19 through June 12.
Painted between 1818 and 1886, the works illustrate America’s scenic
splendor as seen through the eyes of some of the country’s most
important painters.

“The Hudson River School created some of the most beautiful paintings
in American art. Their works forged a new vision for landscape painting
and embodied the expansive and optimistic spirit of 19th- century
America,” noted Thomas Padon, Director of the Brandywine River Museum of
Art.

In the first decade of the 19th century, the expansive landscapes of
the Hudson River Valley and adjacent areas, such as the Catskills and
the Adirondack Mountains, inspired an elite group of American artists
known as the Hudson River School. Coming together under the influence of
British émigré painter Thomas Cole (1801–1848), they shared a
philosophy and appreciation for the natural landscape. Today their
collective works are considered the first uniquely American art
movement. In their idyllic depictions of the landscape, these artists
conveyed not only the majesty of America, but an image of man living in
harmonious balance with nature.

The Poetry of Nature: A Golden Age of American Landscape Painting
opens with seminal works by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand
(1796–1886). The former artist first traveled up the Hudson in 1825. His
tableaux capture the wildness of the American landscape. The latter
frequently worked alongside Cole and was instrumental in leading the
group after Cole’s untimely death in 1848. Cole’s romantic
interpretations of the American landscape—represented in the exhibition
by two paintings, one of a tranquil sunset view on the Catskill Creek
and another of a sublime mountain landscape with jagged peaks piercing
the clouds—demonstrate his mastery of perspective; he is able to convey
vast open spaces and create rich atmospheric effects.

Durand favored tighter views and closely observed details of nature.
Paintings in the exhibition will present his vivid compositions, from
majestic mountain ranges to tranquil woodland interiors and studies of
trees. Durand’s influential Letters on Landscape Painting
(1855–1856), promoted the movement for plein air painting, calling such
excursions, “hard-work-play.” As president of the National Academy of
Design, he advocated for the landscape paintings by his Hudson River
School colleagues at that institution and facilitated the patronage and
rise of the Hudson River School.
Coinciding with an increase in leisure travel, the Hudson River
painters also journeyed to regions noted for their beauty outside of New
York State; New Hampshire, coastal New England, and even the
Brandywine Valley were among the areas featured in their works.

The exhibition has been organized by the New-York Historical Society,
which features one of the most renowned collections of Hudson River
School paintings. Dr. Linda S. Ferber, the director emerita of The
New-York Historical Museum and a leading authority on Hudson River
School artists, is the curator for this extraordinary exhibition.

...“Woodland Brook” (1859), by Cole's
close associate Asher Durand, has a grand scale and immersive
quality, but is actually constructed of various elements to heighten
the depth and drama of the scene.

The extremely detailed depictions
of bark, leaves and dappled sunlight in “June Woods (Germantown)”
by W.T. Richards adhere strictly to reality and serve to put you
right on the shady path.

Speaking of drawing you in, the monumental
“Autumn Woods” by Albert Bierstadt has such a razor-sharp glow in
its depiction of fall foliage and a leaf-strewn stream that you can
almost feel the autumn breeze.

Times of day were meticulously rendered
as well,

shown in the glowing sky in “Seashore (Sunset on the
Coast)” by John Kensett,

and the magnificent “Morning in the Blue
Ridge Mtns., Virginia” by William Sonntag.

The clouds spread out for miles in
“Sunset in the Berkshire Hills” by Frederic Edwin Church...

In the small painting “Catskill
Mountains, Haying” by Thomas Hotchkiss, workers toil in a tiny
field, still in harmony with nature but almost lost amidst all the
natural splendor.

People do actually play a large role in the
foreground composition of “Hudson River Valley From Fort Putnam,
West Point” by George Henry Boughton. They are shown, in their
1800s finery, as they take in the view from a footpath over the ruins
of the fort from the Revolutionary War...

America’s finest impressionist painter, Childe Hassam spent many summers
painting on the Isles of Shoals six miles off the coast of Maine and
New Hampshire.

This exhibition features 39 of the artist’s
finest Shoals paintings in oil and watercolor, borrowed from
distinguished museums and private collections. Taken together, these
paintings offer a sustained reverie on nature and the pleasure of
painting. They possess a rapturous sense of place: the blue Atlantic
breaking against rocks and swirling in tidal pools, dense thickets of
laurel wedged in granite crags, a splendid island garden with its
gemlike blossoms, and the whole island world suffused with a silvered
northern light.

Hassam's many portrayals of the old-fashioned gardens, rocky coast, and
radiant sunlight of the Isles of Shoals, Maine, are among his most
cherished works and were represented extensively. Among them are the
1894 interior scene

The Room of Flowers (private collection)

and the 1901 view

Coast Scenes, Isles of Shoals,

the first canvas by the artist to enter the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Childe Hassam (1859–1935) was the foremost American impressionist of
his generation. Prolific in oil paintings and watercolors, he found his
native New England to be a touchstone for his art. Hassam had a
fascination with Appledore, the largest island of the Isles of Shoals
off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, and he traveled there almost
every summer for thirty years.

This fascinating book traces
Hassam’s artistic exploration of Appledore and reveals a complex
portrait of the island created over time. John W. Coffey, working with
the marine biologist Hal Weeks, revisits Hassam’s painting sites,
identifying where, what, and how the artist painted on the island.
Kathleen M. Burnside considers the range of the artist's stylistic
responses to the island's nature. A photo essay by Alexandra de Steiguer
reveals Appledore’s enduring beauty.

Monday, March 28, 2016

In July 2016 Tate Modern opens a major retrospective of American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), the first UK
exhibition of her work for over twenty years. Marking a century since
O’Keeffe’s debut in New York in 1916, this ambitious and wide-ranging
survey will reassess the artist’s place in the canon of
twentieth-century art and reveal her profound importance. With no works
by O’Keeffe in UK public collections, the
exhibition will be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for audiences
outside of America to view her oeuvre in such depth.

Widely
recognised as a founding figure of American modernism, O’Keeffe gained a
central position in leading art circles between the 1910s and the
1970s. She was also claimed as an important pioneer by feminist artists
of the 1970s. Spanning the six decades in which O’Keeffe was at her most
productive and featuring over 100 major works, this exhibition will
chart the progression of her practice from her early abstract
experiments to her late works, aiming to dispel the clichés that persist
about the artist and her painting.

Opening with the moment of
her first showings at ‘291’ gallery in New York in 1916 and 1917, the
exhibition will feature O’Keeffe’s earliest mature works made while she
was working as a teacher in Virginia and Texas.

Charcoals such as

No. 9 Special 1915

and Early No. 2 1915

will be shown alongside a select group of highly coloured watercolours and oils, such as

Sunrise 1916

and Blue and Green Music
1919.

These works investigate the relationship of form to landscape,
music, colour and composition, and reveal O’Keeffe’s developing
understanding of synaesthesia.

A room in the exhibition will
consider O’Keeffe’s professional and personal relationship with Alfred
Stieglitz (1864-1946); photographer, modern art promoter and the
artist’s husband. While Stieglitz increased O’Keeffe access to the most
current developments in avant-garde art, she employed these influences
and opportunities to her own objectives. Her keen intellect and resolute
character created a fruitful relationship that was, though sometimes
conflictive, one of reciprocal influence and exchange. A selection of
photography by Stieglitz will be shown, including portraits and nudes of
O’Keeffe as well as key figures from the avant-garde circle of the
time, such as Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) and John Marin (1870-1953).

Still
life formed an important investigation within O’Keeffe’s work, most
notably her representations and abstractions of flowers. The exhibition
will explore how these works reflect the influence she took from
modernist photography, such as the play with distortion in

One
of the highlights of the major Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)
retrospective opening at Tate Modern this summer will be the celebrated
flower painting,Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1 1932. This
iconic painting is an important example of the artist’s investigations
into still life, and particularly the flowers for which she is
most famous.

The painting of a humble garden weed is being loaned to Tate Modern
from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. This will be
the first time the work is displayed outside the US since being acquired by the Museum in 2014. It is the most expensive painting sold at auction by a female artist.

The
Jimson weed bloom is native to New Mexico and the focus O’Keeffe
affords it in the painting reflects her growing affinity with the region
in the 1930s - an association that would continue throughout her
lifetime. Being fond of this particular plant, she allowed Jimson weed
to flourish around her patio at her home in Abiquiu and made it the
subject of multiple works, each time presenting a new viewpoint. The
frontal perspective on the flower in Jimson Weed, White Flower No.1 1932 and the symmetry this gives the composition, makes it a particularly striking work in the series.

The
painting reveals the profound influence O’Keeffe took from modernist
photography – its concern with the study of form, use of close up or
magnification and cropping - a practice that was influenced by her
professional and personal relationship with husband and photographer
Alfred Stieglitz (1865-1946), as well as her close friendships with a
number of other photographers.

Widely recognised as a founding figure of
American modernism, O’Keeffe gained a central place within the
avant-garde art scene between the 1910s and the 1970s. Spanning the six
decades in which O’Keeffe was at her most productive and featuring over
100 major works, the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern will chart
the progression of her practice from her early abstract experiments to
her late works from the 1950s and 1960s, aiming to dispel the clichés
that persist about the artist and her painting.

O’Keeffe’s
most persistent source of inspiration however was nature and the
landscape; she painted both figurative works and abstractions drawn from
landscape subjects. Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out of Black Marie’s II 1930 and Red and Yellow Cliffs 1940 chart O’Keeffe’s progressive immersion in New Mexico’s distinctive geography, while works such as Taos Pueblo 1929/34
indicate her complex response to the area and its layered cultures.
Stylised paintings of the location she called the ‘Black Place’ will be
at the heart of the exhibition.

Georgia O’Keeffe
opens at Tate Modern on 6 July 2016, curated by Tanya Barson, Curator,
Tate Modern with Hannah Johnston, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The
exhibition is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Bank
Austria Kunstforum, Vienna and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present forty years of painting by
artist Julian Schnabel. This exhibition marks Schnabel’s first solo
presentation with Blum & Poe.

After a hiatus from the West Coast art scene for nearly a decade,
this first exhibition at Blum & Poe takes the form of a concise
overview of an exhilaratingly divergent painting practice—making a
forceful case for the historical importance of Schnabel’s oeuvre as well
as his ever-growing relevance to a new generation of artists.

Twelve important paintings made between 1975 and 2015 will be
displayed in the gallery’s ground floor. Together these paintings make
manifest the scope and depth of Schnabel’s work—his groundbreaking
material experimentation, his exceptional formal range and simultaneous
mastery of both figurative and abstract idioms. Not only will this
exhibition serve as an introduction to this artist’s legendary work for
younger viewers, it positions Schnabel as one of the great auteurs of the postwar period.

Transcending the question of recognizable style, Schnabel’s practice,
while wildly heterogeneous, is connected together by his unmistakable
personal vision—his distinctive aesthetic touch, the audacity and
freedom of his varied gestures, the insistence on the physicality of his
surfaces, and the unapologetic emotional inflection in all of his
works. As Schnabel wrote in an attempt to locate his unique approach to
making work, “feeling cannot be separated from intellect…what is
expressed is a feeling of love for something that has already existed, a
response to something already felt.”

and a
regal full-length Portrait of Tatiana Lisovskaia As The Duquesa De Alba II (2014) referencing Goya.

Accompanying these compositions, the upstairs gallery features
approximately forty drawings made between 1976 to the present that echo
the formal and conceptual range of the paintings in the downstairs
gallery.

In sum, this exhibition attempts to foreground the emotive punctum that
runs throughout Schnabel’s work—otherwise stated, the wounding point or
touching detail where his unconventional methods and materials are
fused with emotive, tactile, and deeply narrative meaning. Despite the
range in dates in which these works have been made, looking at these
pieces together reveal a consistent artistic “touch” or transformational
element that Schnabel is able to imbue in the found materials he
assimilates into his work.

Running throughout the exhibition is a pictorial vocabulary that is
consistent throughout Schnabel’s career but takes on many forms. The
trope of the white stroke—curvilinear swirls of white paint that often
disrupt both figurative and abstract compositions—or the haphazard
traces of splashed purple pigment are seen in numerous paintings
selected in the show. Likewise, dedications, proper names, and other
literary references in titles are used to evoke a narrative imaginary
that runs through Schnabel’s oeuvre.

As Schnabel wrote about the seminal painting Jack the Bellboy,
featured in the last room of the exhibition, “The difference between
the physical and pictorial elements of the painting confounded an easy
viewing; it was hard to look at. It activated a sensation, like color
blindness, that yielded a sensory disorder that I thought was an
analogue for my emotional state. It was also about the third intangible
element between the viewer and itself: the blind spot. It was like a
sort of dyslexia where a letter’s proximity to another makes it
disappear.”[1]
In many ways Schnabel’s attempt to describe the alchemical reaction
simultaneously generated by the retinal, conceptual, and emotional
affects of his work could be applied to all of the paintings selected
for this exhibition.

This eye-opening exhibition illuminates the historical and ongoing role
of drawing as a means of study, observation, and problem solving, as an
outpouring of the artist’s imagination, and as a method of realizing a
finished work of art.

• “ Spark of Creation” features “first draft” sketches and
inventions. This portion of the exhibition, showcasing the immediacy of
the artistic process, features works such as

• “Figural Abstraction” a section which documents artists’ studies of
human forms and expression. Works featured in this section include

Guercino’s Hercules, (1641–42)

and Ernst Kircher’s Seated Woman in the Studio, completed in 1909.

• “ Storytelling” presents drawings with a narrative theme, such as

Arthur Rackham’s Little Red Riding Hood, 1909,

and Ludovico Carracci’s Judith Beheading Holoferenes, c. 1581–85.

Other themes include “Sense of Place” with Emil Nolde’s Heavy Seas at Sunset, c. 1930–35,

and “Appropriation” with Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 Bratatat!

Catalogue

Master Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Art

This sumptuously illustrated book celebrates the superb yet
little-known collection of drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
The probing catalogue entries, written by a number of scholars, tell
the story of each drawing and examine its place within the artist’s
oeuvre, supported by new research, provenance documentation, and
bibliographic information.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

A rare Francis
Bacon self-portrait is set to come to auction for the first time in May, having
remained in the same private collection since soon after it was painted over
forty-five years ago. Widely acknowledged as the finest self-portrayal Bacon
ever produced,

Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970) will lead Sotheby’s
Evening Auction of Contemporary Art in New York on 11 May 2016, with an estimate
of US$22-30 million.

While Bacon is renowned for capturing the tortured psychological
depths of human existence in his portraits, the overwhelming positivity of Two
Studies for a Self-Portrait renders this work almost unique in the artist’s oeuvre
. Here we see an elated Francis Bacon on the cusp of his career-defining retrospective
at the Grand Palais in 1971 (Bacon was only the second living artist, after
Picasso, to be afforded this honour), and in the throes of his relationship
with George Dyer, whose suicide a year later was to haunt Bacon (and shape his
art) for decades to come.

Little known to the public eye, Two Studies for a
Self-Portrait has been exhibited only twice before - first at the acclaimed
1971 Grand Palais retrospective and then most recently at Marlborough Fine Art Small
Portrait Studies exhibition in London in 1993.

However, perhaps the work’s
iconic status lies in the fact it was chosen to adorn the cover of Milan
Kundera and France Borel’s definitive book

“Two Studies for a
Self-Portrait goes straight in at number one of all the paintings I’ve handled
in my career. Discovering a work such as this is like finding gold du st To my
mind, the painting is worthy of a place alongside the very finest
self-portraits of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso. It’s certainly among the
greatest self-portraits ever offered at auction.” - Oliver Barker, Senior
International Specialist in Contemporary Art

“...he was never more brilliant,
more incisive or more ferocious when it came to depicting himself. In this he
helped revive a genre, and Bacon’s self-portraits can now be seen as among the
most pictorially inventive and psychologically re vealing portraits of the
Twentieth Century” - Michael Peppiatt in: Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, Galleria
Borghese, Caravaggio Bacon , 2009-10

A
masterpiece of self-analysis, Bacon’s dramatic brushstrokes, Impressionistic
palette, use of corduroy fabric, and exigent marks recount the story of this work's creation as the artist brushed, smeared and lifted the paint in his drive
to define his likeness. Photos of the artist’s Reece Mews studio in London show
radiant pink, red, blue, and white hues smea red across his studio door,
echoing those used in Two Studies for a Self Portrait as the artist scraped
clean his brush as he reworked, and layered this canvas. Bacon created only two
other self-portraits in this dual format. One of them,

Two Studies for a Self- Portrait
(1977) sold at Sotheby’s in February 2015 for £14.7m ($22.4m).

2016 is set to
be a red-letter year for Francis Bacon with exhibitions of his work planned at
the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco (sponsored by Sotheby’s), at Tate Liverpool, and
at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné is a
landmark publishing event that presents the entire oeuvre of Bacon’s
paintings for the first time and includes over 100 previously
unpublished works. The impeccably produced five-volume, slipcased
publication, containing each of Bacon’s 584 paintings, has been edited
by Martin Harrison, FSA, the pre-eminent expert on Bacon’s work, alongside research assistant Dr Rebecca Daniels.
An ambitious and painstaking project that has been ten years in the
making, this seminal visual document eclipses in scope any previous
publication on the artist and will have a profound effect on the
perception of his work.

Containing around 800 illustrations across 1,538 pages within five
cloth-bound hardcover volumes, the three volumes that make up the study
of Bacon’s entire painting oeuvre are bookended by two further volumes:
the former including an introduction and a chronology, and the latter a
catalogue of Bacon’s sketches, an index, and an illustrated bibliography
compiled by Krzysztof Cieszkowski. Printed on 170 gsm GardaMatt Ultra
stock in Bergamo, Italy at Castelli Bolis, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné are boxed within a cloth- bound slipcase, and supplied within a bespoke protective shipping carton.

In addition to the 584 paintings, the catalogue will contain
illuminating supporting material. This includes sketches by Bacon,
photographs of early states of paintings, images of Bacon’s furniture,
hand-written notes by the artist, photographs of Bacon, his family and
circle, and fascinating x-ray and microscope photography of his
paintings.

On 11 May 2016 Sotheby’s New York will offer Untitled (New York
City) by Cy Twombly in the Contemporary Art Evening Sale. The work is the only
painting from the famed Blackboard series executed with blue loops on grey
ground and boasts a remarkable history. It was acquired by the current owner
from the artist’ s studio immediately after it 2 was executed in 1968, and has
not been seen in public since. Untitled (New York City) is expected to fetch in
excess of $40 million.

Untitled (New York City) is a one-off example of the artist’s
most hallowed series of Blackboard paintings through which he forged a new
visual language in a period of great convergence in postwar art. However,
unlike every other Blackboard painting that bears white loops, in Untitled (New
York City) Twombly used a blue, rather than white, wax crayon to create the
endless ove rlapping loops on the wet paint. At over 28 square feet, the work
belongs to the elite group of large-scale works by Twombly that can be found in
the world's great museums including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles; The Menil Collection, Houston; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York.

The appearance of Untitled (New York City) at auction comes just six
months after Sotheby’s set a record for the artist with

Untitled [New YorkCity], 1968from the collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Audrey Irmas. That
work was the second Twombly Blackboard to exceed $65 million in the previous 18
months.

The sale will also include a major late Twombly: Untitled (Bacchus 1st
Version V) . The appearance of the 2004 work in May marks the first time an
example from the series, that is widely recognized as defining the artist’s
late work, has appeared at auction. The painting is expected to fetch in excess
of $20 million and will also be on view in Los Angeles alongside highlights by
Franci s Bacon and Andy Warhol.